Last month I wrote that pollsters must have learned something from their humiliating failure in 2016. At this moment, it seems like the only indication of a win for Biden is media polling -- which shows a landslide in his favor. Can an incumbent president really lose when 56% of people say they're better off than four years ago?
It is an odd election season. Pretty much everyone thinks the Democrats are on their way to a crushing victory, yet it is hard to see why. A whopping 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago, and President Trump draws large, enthusiastic crowds wherever he goes. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is a pale shell of his formerly buffoonish self. When Joe is able to get out of bed, his campaign schedules intimate invitation-only events. Supposedly this is because of COVID, but everyone knows it is really because he doesn't want to be embarrassed by his inability to draw a crowd. Probably no one outside of Biden's immediate family particularly wants him to be president.So what is going on?
Kevin McCullough writes that the polls are wrong because Trump voters are reluctant to admit who they're voting for.
Now the "smart people" will tell you [that a Trump win is] not possible and that he lags Joe Biden in the polls by margins too big to overcome. If you only look at the selective polls listed in the Real Clear Politics average one might come to that conclusion (Just like they did in 2016).One thing they won't tell you though is that the hesitancy to tell pollsters what they think is a real phenomenon. A little more than a month ago Bloomberg published a survey that demonstrated Republicans and Independents are more than twice as likely as Democrats to not reveal to pollsters their true thoughts.
Maybe. I think it's more likely that any significant errors stem from inaccurate demographic mixes -- that they're underweighting Trump's support among Blacks, Hispanics, gays, and others.
Mollie Hemingway points out that Trump is polling better now than he did in 2016.
So you see that Biden is averaging a 7-point lead in Pennsylvania, but Clinton was averaging a nearly identical lead there four years ago -- before Trump won it narrowly on election day. Likewise, Biden's Florida lead is very similar to Clinton's lead four years ago. Trump won Florida.Biden is not performing as well in Wisconsin as Clinton was four years ago. Trump won that state. Biden is doing less well in Michigan, according to the polls, than Clinton did four years ago. Trump won Michigan. Biden's doing a bit better in North Carolina than Clinton did but Trump won that state by a 4-point margin.
There are a lot of people who don't put much confidence in polling, but this table shows that even according to the polls themselves, Trump's performance at this point in the election process is on track with where he was in 2016.
I'm not good at predicting elections, but I will: Trump will win re-election.
